Jorge Luis Borges was uncanny in
adopting and in adapting, and assimilating the literature of
other traditions. Borges provided an example to Latin
Americans of a polyglot and voracious polycultural writer
who could mine and treasure literature in English, French,
German, Latin, and in the Spanish literary traditions. While
creating a sense of Argentine literature, Borges borrowed
from the languages he knew, but English dominated in his
reading. Much has been written about the American authors
and the English and Scottish authors who influenced Borges’
innovations in language and in fiction. The Irish,
especially James Joyce, Jonathan Swift, Bishop George
Berkeley, and Dun Scotus, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats,
and Flann O’Brien influenced Borges’ writing and thinking to
a degree that outstrips all other authors. The Irish are
unique influences, and it is their influence which this
paper seeks to address through the special lenses of Borges’
essays and fiction. Borges’ essay “When Fiction Lives in
Fiction”, a book review of Flann O’Brien’s novel At
Swim-Two-Birds (1939) he wrote just two weeks before
reviewing the labyrinth of words, James Joyce’s last novel,
Finnegans Wake, and before he left a runic, Orientalist
fable “Story of Two Kings and of Two Labyrinths”. Never one
to miss the significance of dates, Borges’ review of Joyce’s
last novel was on Bloomsday of 1939, and his review of
O’Brien’s was a fortnight earlier. In these reviews, and in
the fable, Borges lays out what he admires – and what he was
to do in his own fiction in a brilliant spate after Joyce’s
death, demonstrating that his response was the straight
line, the eleatic line, to Joyce’s verbal labyrinth. Samuel
Beckett not only shared the Formentor Prize with Borges; he,
like Borges, reacted to Joyce’s epics Ulysses and Finnegans
Wake with pared-down language, but with a density of ideas
that only Borges has matched.